Why this indie rock star says turning off your phone is a political act

Turning off your phone before the music begins at a symphony orchestra concert may be more than good etiquette – for musician and composer Bryce Dessner, it’s a political act.

Best known as guitarist and songwriter with US indie band The National, Dessner is also a composer of classical music whose output includes works for orchestra, string quartet and solo instruments.

“I’m not someone who stays out of politics – I get involved in a lot of causes and things – but I think the music often is doing other things, it speaks for itself,” he says.

“The experience of coming into the concert hall – to get off your phone, and just be in the room with music, and to feel those things – in a way is a kind of activism.”

At a rehearsal with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra this week, Dessner – dressed in triple-denim with jacket, jeans and cap – paces the front of the Opera House stage. In his hands is the oversized orchestral score for his new cello concerto, Trembling Earth .

The cello soloist, Anastasia Kobekina, is a picture of poise, her bare feet rooted to the floor, even as her bow threatens to throw off sparks in a tightly wound rhythmic passage.

Co-commissioned by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and having its first Australian performances on Saturday and Sunday, Trembling Earth was written especially for Kobekina and already has been heard in Dublin, Berlin and Prague.

The title takes its name from a painting of an oak forest by Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch that Dessner recalls seeing in Oslo. He says his musical composition, by turns lyrical and rhythmically intense, is intended to convey the natural world and be a reflection on human folly and destruction.

“It’s not a political piece but it’s an awareness of the tremendous instability and conflict in the world – that nature bears witness to human calamity and catastrophe and mismanagement and bad politics,” he says. “What is the experience of the earth through all of this?”

While his band The National is active in US politics – they backed the presidential campaigns of Democratic candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – Dessner says he is less overtly partisan in his classical music. An exception was his piece Skrik Trio , which he describes as a scream at Donald Trump’s 2016 election win.

While Kobekina is making her first visit to Australia, Dessner is no stranger to these shores, having previously toured with The National, and partnered on earlier projects with Sydney Dance Company, the Australian String Quartet and the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

He will appear in two separate programs with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.